Social Behaviour III (Ch 14) Flashcards
Aspects of social interaction
- exclusion and inclusion
- prejudice and discrimination
- aggression
- helping
- attraction
Consequences of perceiving others as different from ourselves
- We sometimes evaluate and treat people differently because of the group they belong to
- Our action are based on in-group/out-group distinctions (us vs them)
- It hurts to be excluded from our group
In-group/out-group bias
-showing positive feelings toward people in our own group and negative feelings toward those in other groups
Out-group homogeneity
-tendency to see all members of an out-group as the same
Study on ethnicity and willingness to associate with out-groups
-ratings of perceived similarity were correlated with willingness to affiliate with ethnic out-groups
Rejection
- one result of human tendency is to include and exclude others is that we can get left out
- rejection hurts
- possibly because our social connections are as important as our physically safety
- brain’s physical pain circuits also evolved to signal when we have been excluded from the group
- when people read friendly messages from people that they feel socially connected to, they feel physically warm and show brain activation patterns that correspond to the areas active during actual physical warmth
The social psychology of social networks
- networks form among people who share interests
- networks defined by associations among people that brand and spread beyond those people one knows directly
- certain habits can spread in a social network (more commons among members than non members)
- attitudes, behaviours, and habits move through social networks via the 3 degrees rule
3 degrees rule
- how attitudes, behaviour, and habits moves through social networks
- your behaviour (eg. Food preference) can affect your friends (one degree) and their friends (two degrees) and their friend’s friends (three degrees)
Mimicry
- process by which we mirror the actions of others, may be one means by which our emotional behaviour can impact another person
- behaviour gets distorted as it moves outward towards others
Social Capital
- the value or payoff (socially or professionally) one gains by connecting with others
- may be to get reinforcement for their views or images (eg. Receiving likes on Facebook status)
Prejudice
- a biased attitude toward a group of people or an individual member of a group based on generalizations about what members of that group are like
- often stems from stereotypes rather than from careful observation or behaviour
- prejudices are generally negative and often based on insufficient information
Discrimination
- refers to negative actions directed towards another based upon that individual’s group membership and is usually the result of prejudicial attitudes
- can also results from institutionalize rules, such as a requirement that firefighters must be a certain higher, which often discriminates against women and some ethnic groups
Racism
-prejudices based on race-ethnicity
Sexism
-prejudices based on sex
Jane Elliot
- a teacher with no psychology training tried an experiment where she divided her class into brown eyes and blue eyes, then assigned one to be superior each day, and one inferior
- superior students treated inferior students poorly, and also found that student performed poorly on tests if they were inferior
- “Even nice Canadians are racist”
Conscious and unconscious prejudice
- reactions become automatic
- prejudices can operate outside conscious awareness and they sometimes stand in complete contrast to one’s conscious beliefs
- possibly evolutionary basis: the mechanism of recognizing group members may have evolved to preserve group harmony, cohesions and close alliances to enhance the survivability of individuals
Study of Implicit Bias
- explicit vs implicit prejudice
- explicit: plainly stated
- implicit: indirect views
Mahzarin Banaji
- studies relationship between implicit and explicit memory
- principle of priming may apply to social cognition in racist thinking
- those who grow up in racist community or household could ingrain certain biases
- may develop attitudes unknowingly